Investment casting takes place as is known using a disposable pattern in a disposable mold, which is formed in the shape of a once usable ceramic coating of the pattern. The known method comprises the following steps:                producing a positive pattern (in the same shape as the cast component to be produced) made of hard or elastic material;        producing a temporary shape by casting a liquid over the pattern and cooling until it solidifies;        extracting the pattern;        forming a temporary pattern by casting a second liquid into the cavity of the temporary mold and cooling until it solidifies;        melting or loosening of the temporary mold;        ceramic coating of the temporary pattern in order to form a solid ceramic shell around the temporary pattern;        melting or loosening of the temporary pattern and evacuating of the thereby accruing liquid from the ceramic shell;        filling of the cavity of the shell with molten metal and letting it solidify in order to thus form the final cast component.        
Most producers of gas turbines work on improved multi-walled and thin-walled gas turbine blades made of superalloys. They have complicated air cooling channels in order to improve the efficiency of the blade inner cooling in order to enable more thrust and to achieve a satisfactory lifespan. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,295,530 and 5,545,003 are directed at improved multi-walled and thin-walled gas turbine blade designs, which have complicated air cooling channels for this purpose.
The method according to the invention enables the production of all types of high-quality cast components, because it enables, depending on its complexity, the formation of a disposable pattern in a disposable mold, simultaneously averts the break and deformation risk of disposable patterns and avoids needing to use cores, which are susceptible to deformation.
Investment casting is one of the oldest known transformation processes, which was first used thousands of years ago, in order to produce detailed handcrafts made of metal like copper, bronze and gold. Industrial investment casting was used in the 1940s as World War II increased the need for dimensionally accurate components made of specialized metal alloys. Today, investment casting is frequently used in the aviation and energy industry in order to create gas turbine components like blades and conductive surfaces with complex shapes and internal cooling channel geometries.
The production of a gas turbine rotor blade or guide blade from investment casting comprises the production of a ceramic casting mold with an outer ceramic shell with an inner surface, which corresponds with the wing shape, and one or more ceramic cores positioned within the outer ceramic shell, according to the internal cooling channels, which are to be formed within the bearing surface. Molten alloy is casted into the ceramic casting mold, then cools down and hardens. The outer ceramic shell and the ceramic core(s) are then removed through mechanical or chemical means in order to release the casted blade with the external profile mold and the hollow molds of the internal cooling channels (in the shape of the ceramic core(s)).
There is a plurality of techniques for the formation of mold inserts and cores with quite complicated and detailed geometries and dimensions. A just as multifaceted series of techniques is used in order to position and hold the inserts in the molds. The most common technique for holding cores in mold arrangements is the positioning of small ceramic pins, which can be designed as one piece with the mold or the core or both and which protrude from the surface of the mold towards the surface of the core and serve to position or support the core insert. After the casting, the holes in the cast component are filled, for example through welding or the like, preferably with the alloy from which the cast component is formed.
The ceramic core is typically brought into the desired core shape through injection molding, transfer molding or casting of a suitable liquid of ceramic core material. The ceramic core material comprises one or more ceramic powders, a binding agent and optional additives, which are casted into a correspondingly shaped core molding tool.
A ceramic core for injection molding is produced in that first the desired core mold is formed into corresponding casting mold halves made of wear-resistant, hardened steel through precision processing, and the mold halves are then brought together to form an injection volume according to the desired core mold, whereupon the injection of ceramic molding material into the injection volume is pressurized. As already mentioned, the molding material contains a mixture of ceramic powder and binding agent. After the ceramic molding material has hardened into a “green preform”, the mold halves are separated in order to release the green preform.
After the green-body mold core has been removed from the mold, it is fired at a high temperature in one or more steps in order to remove the volatile binding agent and to sinter and harden the core and namely for use during the casting of a metallic material like for example a nickel- or cobalt-based superalloy. These are normally used in order to cast a monocrystal gas turbine blade.
During the casting of the hollow gas turbine blades with inner cooling channels, the tired ceramic core is positioned in a ceramic investment casting shell mold in order to form the internal cooling channels in the cast component. The fired ceramic core in the investment casting of hollow blades typically has a flow-optimized contour with an inflow edge and an outflow edge with a thin cross-section. Between these front and rear edge areas, the core can have elongated but also otherwise shaped openings in order to form inner walls, steps, deflections, ribs and similar profiles for delimiting and establishing the cooling channels in the cased turbine blade.
The fired ceramic core is then used during the production of the outer mold shell in the known wax investment casting method, wherein the ceramic core is arranged in a pattern molding tool and a disposable pattern is formed around the core and namely through pressurized injection of pattern material like wax, thermoplast or the like into the mold into the space between the core and the inner walls of the mold.
The complete casting mold made of ceramic is formed by positioning the ceramic core within the two joined halves of another mold made of finished, hardened steel (called a wax pattern mold or wax pattern tool), which defines an injection volume, which corresponds with the desired shape of the blade, in order to then inject melted wax into the wax pattern mold around the ceramic core. Once the wax has hardened, the halves of the wax pattern mold are separated and removed and they free the ceramic core surrounded by a wax pattern, which now corresponds with the blade shape.
The temporary pattern with the ceramic core in it is repeatedly subjected to steps for building up the shell mold on it. For example, the pattern/core subassembly is repeatedly dipped into the ceramic slurry, excess slurry is allowed to flow off, sanded with ceramic stucco and then air-dried in order to build up several ceramic layers, which form the mold shell on the arrangement. The resulting surrounded pattern/core arrangement is then subjected to the step of removing the pattern for example via steam autoclave in order to eliminate in a targeted manner the temporary or disposable pattern so that the mold shell with the ceramic core arranged in it remains. The mold shell is then fired at a high temperature in order to establish an appropriate stability of the mold shell for the cast metal.
A molten metallic material like a nickel- or cobalt-based superalloy is casted and solidified in the preheated shell mold in order to create a cast component with a polycrystalline or monocrystalline grain. The resulting casted blade still contains the ceramic core in order to thus form the internal cooling channels after removing the core. The core can be removed through flushing or other conventional techniques. The hollow, casted, metallic flow profile cast component is created.
This known investment casting method is expensive and time-consuming. Many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment are typically associated with the development of a new blade design. Moreover, design decisions are limited by process-related limitations during the production of ceramic cores for example due to their fragility as well as due to the time-consuming production for detailed or large cores. The metal-processing industry recognized these limits and developed at least a few gradual improvements like for example the improved method for casting cooling channels on a blade outflow edge in U.S. Pat. No. 7,438,527. But, since the market demands continuously increasing efficiency and performance of gas turbines, the limits of the existing investment casting processes are becoming increasingly problematic.
Investment casting techniques are susceptible to a series of imprecisions. While imprecisions on the outer contour can often be corrected with conventional production techniques, those on the internal structural molds of cores are difficult and often even impossible to eliminate.
Internal imprecisions result from known factors. These are generally imprecisions during the production of the core structure, imprecisions during the coating of the core in the wax tool during production, installation of the mold, unexpected changes or defects from fatigue of the ceramic molds and failure of the shell, the core or the fastening elements during production, installation and handling before or during the casting process.
The exact design, dimensioning and position of the core insert became the biggest problem in the production of molds. These aspects of the investment casting underlie the invention although the method of the present invention can also be used in other technology.
The production of casting mold and core are typically limited in the possibility of reliably forming fine details with sufficient resolution. In terms of the accuracy of the positioning, reliable dimensions and the creation of complex and detailed molds, the known systems are very limited.
The core inserts are generally mold parts, produced using conventional injection molding or molds of ceramic, followed by suitable firing techniques. It is in the nature of the ceramic cores that the accuracy is considerably less than that achievable in metal casting processes. There is much greater shrinkage in the conventional ceramic casting compounds or faults like a much greater tendency towards the formation of cracks, bubbles and other defects. There is thus a high fault and scrap rate, which results from uncorrectable deficiencies, caused by faulty cores and core positioning. Or at least considerable effort is required during reworking in order to correct the cast components lying outside the tolerances if they are even accessible for correction through post-processing, sanding or the like. The productivity and efficiency of the investment casting method are mainly restricted by these limitations.
A further limiting aspect of investment casting was also always the extensive lead time for the development of the molding tools normally from metal for the cores and the temporary pattern as well as the associated considerably effort. The development of the individual phases of the molding tool, including in particular the geometry and the dimensions of the wax molds, the geometry and dimension of the green body and the final geometry of the fired molds, in particular the cores, and the resulting configuration and dimensioning of the cast component produced in these molding tools are dependent on a plurality of variables, including warping, shrinkage and crack formation during the different production steps and in particular during the firing of the ceramic green body. As is well known to a person skilled in the field, these parameters are not exactly predictable, and the development of the investment casting molds is a highly iterative and empirical process of trial and error, which extends over a period of 20 to 50 weeks for complex cast components, before the process can be put into operation.
This results in that complex investment casting of cavities is limited in particular to the production of individual parts and casting in a significant number is generally not possible due to limited number of cycles of the method and its elements, in particular the molding tools. Changes in the design of the cast components require tool post-processing to an appropriate extent and are thus very expensive and time-consuming.
The prior art paid attention to these problems and has made progress in the use of improved ceramic compounds, which reduce the occurrence of such problems to a certain degree.
Although these techniques have led to improvements, they are at the expense of the costs of the casting process and yet do not achieve all desired improvements.
In the case of those techniques that comprise an impact on the green bodies and in particular a mechanical processing of the green bodies, experience has shown that the changes in the dimension during the firing of the ceramic bodies then still cause a series of imprecisions, which limit the realization of the sought geometry and dimensions of the fired bodies. Due to the fragility of the green preforms, the techniques that can be use are limited and considerable manual work is generally required. Even with the best precautionary measures and the greatest care, a considerable portion of the cores are finally destroyed by the work processes.
However, particularly disadvantageously, the attempts of the prior art even in its latest state do little to improve the cycle time of the molding tool development or to reduce the number of necessary iterations needed to produce the final molding tools in the required accuracy of the mold and dimensions. The prior art provides no effective techniques for reworking the shape of the shell and cores, which lie outside of the specifications, or in order to change the molds for design changes without restarting the molding tool development process.
Additional prior art comprises the milling of waxes especially in dental applications, but for which there is no direct application in investment casting.